Dan met Mark at Hard Media in 1995. Mark had founded the company four years earlier, with Keld van Schreven, to publish magazines including G-Spot and Hey Tony. By the mid 90s, however, more and more companies were calling on Hard Media for their digital expertise.

Initially this meant interactive kiosks, for Levis, Miss Selfridge and Diesel Jeans, but soon we produced websites and advertising campaigns for Red Bull, Sony Playstation, Ogilvy & Mather, Campaign and Revolution Magazines, and many more. Along the way we launched the purely-digital company Hard Reality, and started picking up awards left, right and centre. The website we built for Diesel Jeans won the first every Yell award for the best designed UK website, and our CampaignLive site for Campaign Magazine beat off some incredible competition from around the world to pick up the inaugural Cannes Cyberlion for best online brand promotion.

All of this success attracted plenty of attention from larger players, and in 1998 Hard Reality was sold to global advertising agency Leo Burnett. Mark and Dan continued there for three years as head of Leo Burnetts new interactive division, working with a diverse set of clients from McDonalds to Morgan Stanley. We are particularly proud of our work with Kelloggs, which included a series of multiple award-winning Coco Pops campaigns, and the most successful cross-media product launch ever, for Kelloggs Real Fruit Winders.

After our time at the centre of the London media world, we needed a change of pace. For two years we worked on personal art projects including FAD magazine, took long holidays, ate too much, drank red wine and chilled out with our loved ones.

During this period we were contacted by Hounslow NHS Primary Care Trust, who wanted to use our youth marketing experience to help them reach teenagers in their area. Together we created So Safe, a branded digital soap opera highlighting the dangers of drugs, self-harm, bullying, smoking and more. Again our work was lauded and awarded.

Now weve caught the creative bug again. We want to return to the type of cutting edge work which helped us get established. Markanddan was formed in October of 2005 to create exciting, beautiful, meaningful, inspiring, different work in a variety of media. We are rolling!